Review

• User experience– Why is it important?

• The overall experience with a product service or event.

• Convergence of several datasets:– Look and feel

•Is it joyful?– Information design

•Does it support user needs?– Interactivity

•How well does it work?

• Use:– Focus

» By being crystal clear on objectives, customers, and markets.

• Use:– User Intimacy:

» Get inside the users head so you can be their advocate.

• Use:– Process:

» Research. Design. Test. Then do it again.

• Use:– Alignment:

• Make sure your goals are aligned with your customers needs and expectations.

– Focus– User Intimacy– Process– Alignment

mood boardsset tone/general direction

competitive analysislook at competitors

site auditlook at ourselves

creative briefwhat are we going to do?

personaswho are we doing it for?

PART ONE - Creative Briefs

• A creative brief is like a road map. A good brief leads quickly to an imaginative and persuasive finish.

• A bad brief can go in the wrong direction. It may be a total waste of time. Bad briefs usually start with bad data.

• There are many mutations of the creative brief, so adaptability is key: check the clients expectations before turning one in!

• Title– The name of the brief should be an indication quickly showing what is going to happen:

– “Revising the Seattle Times website for quick readability”

– “New advertising for the City Zoo targeting youth 12-18”

– “The Sex Pistols new video announcing label change”

• Background or Overview– Very easy: Who? What? When? Why?:

• Target audience

• Objectives– One or several lines focusing on the Most Important Thing that should be accomplished.

• The Message/Tone– What are we saying (like a written mood board)?

• Media?– A checklist of items needed to make the project a success (like content!).

• Creative Considerations:– ANYTHING ELSE going into this we need to know?

• Deadline?– What are the delivery points for approval and revisions? When is the drop dead date for production delivery? When is the drop dead date for public consumption?

BREVITY IS THE NAME OF THE GAME

PART TWO - Writing Personas

• Personas describe target users, giving a clear picture of how they are likely to use the system.

• users' goals and needs become a common point of focus for the team

• the team can concentrate on designing for a manageable set of personas knowing that they represent the needs of many users

• they are relatively quick to develop and replace the need to canvass the whole user community and spend months gathering user requirements

• they help avoid the trap of building what users ask for rather than what they will actually use

• design efforts can be prioritized based on the personas

• disagreements over design decisions can be sorted out by referring back to the personas

• designs can be constantly evaluated against the personas, reducing the frequency of large and expensive usability tests.

- Interview business stakeholders that interact frequently with users. These people have had hundreds if not thousands of interactions with end users and are already conscious of users' behavioral patterns. Respect the wealth of knowledge your business stakeholders hold and get them involved early on in the persona research. This helps to build their buy in to the persona technique.

- Review market research and interview your organization's market research specialists. Once again these people have frequent interaction with end users and are trained to pick up patterns in attitudes and behaviors.

- Survey users and business stakeholders using quantitative methods. This is a good way to gather large amounts of demographic data and to identify trends in skill levels and tasks performed. However it cannot replace direct interaction and observation with interview subjects as there is no way to tap into the users' subconscious beliefs and attitudes.

- If you are designing a web site, talk to friends and family that are users of the current website or potential users of the new website. Chat to people over dinner parties or at the pub. This is not rigorous research, but some research is better than none.

INFORMATION TO GATHER DURING INTERVIEWS - Basic demographics such as age, job title, length of time in position - Job responsibilities and what a typical day looks like - Tasks that take the longest, are the most critical or are performed most often

- Common questions or tasks in relation to the website's domain - Major frustrations with the job and the organisation

- Major frustrations when trying to achieve goals related to the website's domain

- What the person likes best about their job - Skill levels relating to the job as well as technology

- How time poor or rich the person is

- Goals, attitudes, beliefs (conscious and subconscious)

• Give your persona a name.– Real names, from the phone book,create a vivid picture for your clients to associate with real customers. Let’s call her “Sarah.”

• Give your persona a motivation.– “Sarah needs to get a checking account and wants to compare different kinds of accounts available. She is worried about minimum balance and additional fees.”

• Write a scenario for Sarah.– “Sarah is a new college student and getting her first checking account. She knows her social security number but little else, but only has a couple of hours to do this.”

• Write Sarahs behavior.– “Sarah starts on the home page and clicks on ‘About Checking Accounts’. She picks two accounts that seem like a good fit and writes them down to remember.”

• Give Sarah a voice.– “I don’t mind researching stuff online but I’d rather talk to somebody in person. Picking an account is like picking toothpaste---too many brands.”

• Frances Miller : Wants to open a checking account

• Sixty-seven year-old Frances is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve. She lives in her own home, bakes a pie once a week so that she has something to serve for Sunday visitors (usually one of her children and their immediate family), and has two cats. The cats names are Fred and Wilma, names given to them by four-year old grandson Bobby. She likes to knit and do needlework, which she either gives away as presents to her family or donates to the annual sale to raise money for the church she belongs to.

• Every morning she goes for a one hour walk along the lake front when the weather is good. On bad days she’ll go with her neighbor to the local mall where a group of senior citizens Mall Stroll each morning before sitting down at one of the restaurants for coffee or tea. For breakfast Frances prefers a cup of Earl Grey tea and two slices of whole-wheat toast with her own home-made preserves. Lunch is typically a bowl of soup or a sandwich and then she’ll have the opposite for dinner.

• She is a middle-class retiree living on a fixed income. Her mortgage has been paid off and she has one credit card which she seldom uses. She has been a customer of the bank for 57 years although has never used an automated teller machine (ATM) and never intends to. She has no patience for phone banking and does not own a computer. Every Monday at 10:30 am she will visit her local bank branch to withdraw enough cash for the week. She prefers to talk with Selma the branch manager or with Robert, a CSR who was a high-school friend of her oldest son.

New Music Express wants to keep its readers as they mature. They are going to redesign

their website.

So, let’s write a sample persona based on this photo: